Video Editing PC Advice

R

renaissanceman

New Member
I need advice for components for a pc that will be used primarily for transferring video from vhs to dvd (with some editing of these), surfing internet, and very limited gaming. Sacrifices, if necessary, will be made in the area of gaming (video card, memory, cpu, whatever). If I don't need it, I don't want it. I am growing weary of researching and reading contradictory info on each component I investigate. I just need the basics required for the video editing. My current pc is so old(Dell optiplex gx1, 500mhz), virtually any upgrade will seem huge, but I definitely want to be able to take my old camcorder tapings and transfer them effevctively and efficiently to dvd. Some of the footage is out of real time sequence, so I will have to be able to cut and move episodes around to create a fluent time line. I lean toward intel cpu, so any sugestions in the following areas?

MOBO-Asus?? I have a radion 9600 128mb ddr agp 8x/4x...is it worth using?

CPU-dual core overkill for me??

RAM- ddr or ddr2?

Do I need a Video Card? or is onboard sufficient?

Video capture card with rca inputs

SATA Hard Drive size-considering seagate 320gig

DVD burner

ATX Case

PSU size- 500 watt enough??

Unfortunately my budget is around $500 Thanks for helping out...
 
Choose your CPU first. An AMD Single Core probably is what will be in your price range. Try to go with Socket AM2. Are you going to be getting a dedicated video card? As far as RAM goes, if you get Socket AM2, you'll be getting DDR2 Ram, whereas if you go the Socket 939 route, you'll be looking at DDR Ram. Onboard video will be sufficient if you are not gaming too much, look into motherboards with Nvidia 6100 or 6150 integrated graphics.
 
My advice would be get a cheap computer and do your editing though Firewire(perhaps get a firewire to RCA bridge) Firewire is a very high quality format compared to others, and is much easier to work with than say uncompressed video or MPEG2 video. It is also easier to both input and output with little hardware upgrades.

I used a PIII 733 for video editing while using Firewire, and it worked just fine. The only real drawback was final rendering takes a while. However, the editing process really wasn't too bad. So really, with firewire, you only need a very fast computer for the rendering process. Just cutting the video and all, most any low/mid-end computer should do fine.
 
I hardly game at all, don't have time, so I'm probably good without a card. I assume ddr2 is advantageous, but to what degree? For a non-gamer, is 512mb ddr 400 enough? What would you recommend as a good cpu speed for vidio editing??

As for the firewire option, I do not have dedicated firewire port on my current pc. Is it possible to adapt to my usb port??
 
with video editing, it is advisable to have a lot of RAM (1-2GB is good) since thats where a lot of your video will be stored for quick access by the editing program. Also, the faster the processor, the faster the conversion and editing will go.
 
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